Over the last several decades, governments across the Western world have dramatically expanded the power of the state to euthanize their own citizens. The Netherlands and Belgium legalized euthanasia in 2002. Canada’s Supreme Court struck down the country’s prohibition on assisted suicide in 2015; its Parliament created medical assistance in dying, or MAiD, the following year. Spain followed in 2021. Last year, the United Kingdom’s House of Commons voted to legalize assisted suicide. And last week, French lawmakers did the same.
The results of these laws have been disastrous, says British philosopher Kathleen Stock. In a conversation with me about her convincing new book, Do Not Go Gentle: The Case Against Assisted Death, Stock noted that doctors are killing people with treatable physical and mental conditions who could otherwise have lived for years or decades. Advocates in every country promised that strict safeguards would confine the practice to rare, hopeless cases at the very end of life, but that didn’t happen. The eligibility criteria instead expanded from terminal illness to chronic pain, disability, and psychiatric suffering.
